Simple:
1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU.
What you produce is not “yours”, it’s “your employer’s”. You don’t have ownership, and very limited to no agency.
2. People lost any tangible connection to the quality and quantity of their output.
Most workers don’t get rewarded for working harder and producing more or better output. On the contrary, they are often penalized with more and/or harder work.
To quote Office Space: “That makes a man work just hard enough not to get fired.”
3. People lost their humanity. They are no longer persons. They are resources. Human resources. And they are treated like it.
They are exploited for gain and dumped when no longer needed.
Lololol
Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki:
1. From a worker's product
2. From a worker's productive activity
3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being)
4. From other workers
Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.
Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.
But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".
Advising on where to go from there in an actionable way that produces good results is the hard part. Marx didn't do it. Those attempting implementation of his ideas have an exceptional record and not in a good way. And worse still, some of the worst aspects of those movements are the ones that stuck around to be peddled again and again under different brands.
Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"
This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.
At a high level nobody works smarter and harder than people working for themselves because they see the direct results in near linear proportion. So basically half the workforce was in that situation vs a tenth. Say nothing about taxation and other things that cost more the higher up you go and serve to fractionally break or dilute the "work harder, make more, live better" feedback loop.
It can be annoying to say, but modern factory produced things are in an absurdly higher quality spectrum than most of what proceeded them. This is absolutely no different from when machined parts for things first got started. We still have some odd reverence for "hand crafted" things when we know that computer aided design and manufactured are flat out better. In every way.
As for ownership, I hate to break it to you, but it is very likely that a good many of the master works we ascribe to people were heavily executed by assistants. Not that this is too bad, but would be akin to thinking that Miyazaki did all of the art for the movies. We likely have no idea who did a lot of the work we ascribe to single artists throughout history.
On to the rest of the points, even the ones I somewhat resonate with are just flat out misguided. People were ALWAYS resources. Well before the modern world.
It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.
A furniture maker builds a chair, ships it out, and they don’t see it again. Pride in their craft is all about joy of mastery and building a good external reputation.
In most software jobs, the thing you build today sticks around and you’ll be dealing with it next month. Pride in your craft can be self serving because building something well makes life easier for future-you
Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.
If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.
There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.
> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.
It's not ignored. It is already encoded into the original comment. No need to repeat what is already said.
In guitar manufacturing, CNC machines were a revolution. The quality of mid-range guitars improved massively, until there was little difference between them and the premium ones.
In furniture, modern manufacturing techniques drastically worsened the quality of everything. MDF and veneers are inherently worse than hand-crafted wood. The revolution here was making it cheaper.
CNC and other machining techniques raise the high bar for what's possible, and they have the potential to lower costs. That's it. They don't inherently improve quality, that's a factor of market forces.
Lol alienation of labor is not a single "sentiment" - it's a core principle. So like it or not you share a core principle with Marx.
The appropriate comparison is which is better for the same price
Particularly, furniture benefits greatly from hard wood. At least, the furniture that is old that you are likely to see. It also benefits heavily from being preserved, not used.
> There are no plantations around here.
FWIW you haven't really stated where "here" is for you. It's not necessarily going to be the same for everyone, and based on the parent comments, the potential area under discussion could include the entirety of the US and Europe (although the initial comment only mentioned UK specifically, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's explicitly only talking about that). I'm not sure you can categorically state that no one in this conversation could be talking about areas that have plantations.
This sounds like a semantic disagreement.
I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.
Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".
"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.
There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...
Tech workplaces are incredibly ephemeral too. Reorgs, departures, constant hiring - so if you leave today, in 5-10 years, there might be no single person left who still remembers or thinks highly of the heroic all-nighters you pulled off. In fact, your old team probably won't exist in its current shape.
If you build quality furniture for your customers, chances are, it will outlive you. If you work on some frontend piece at Amazon, it won't. I think the amount of pride in your workmanship needs to scale with that.
There is more to alienation than equity.
...
> theory
these two words aren't interchangeable
> Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc
...
> generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people
literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"
you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.
That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?
Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.
Also you know what, some code is disposable. Sure, we all want to craft amazing sculptures of metaphorical beautiful wooden chairs that will last a lifetime, but sometimes what the customer needs is a stack of plastic chairs, cheap, and done next week. Who cares if they break after like 1 year.
So, sometimes when I accept that my boss wants something rushed through, I don’t complain about the tech debt it’ll cause, I don’t fight back about how it should’ve designed to have wonderful code… not because I have no pride in my work, but because I understand the businesses needs.
And sometimes the business just wants you to make plastic chairs.
I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.
TLDR: survivorship
The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.
The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.
But, it doesn't. It's not as if you get to sit around doing nothing if you did a great job, you just get some new software project. The company gets to enjoy the benefit of a job well done.
Feudalism in North America, in the 1900s? Your geography and timelines are way off.
The non-farmers were already accounted for. Did you, uh, forget to read the thread?
Exactly. That's why you can't jump from "people don't feel like they own their labor" and "people bemoan their boss" to Marx's theory of alienation.
> literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"
But the very framing that this is an ill that is unique to industrial society is Marxist. Slavery, corveé labor, taxes, poor laborers, marginalisation existed for thousands years in one form or another.
> you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.
I don't dispute that Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is original or significant. I dispute your claim that people who share similar sentiment have to agree with Marx's theory of alienation.
Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.
People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.
Now of course you I can’t blame people for wanting more money and better standards of living, and that’s always been a thing. But many jobs that used to afford you a middle class life don’t anymore for young people.
I saw my engineering school software engineer department going from the least sought after specialty to the most in one year. The number of people passionate about tech didn’t suddenly jump, but each year we have a report about the last promotion average starting salary and software engineering was at the top for the first time.
Generally incorrect, but it depends. Wear can cause mdf/veneer to have "bad optics" compared to solid wood, but mdf/veneer can have more suitable physical properties and enables more consistent visual quality and design possibilities.
I also see survivorship bias keep coming up. Each time it claims to be have been addressed in the original comment, and that's that. Yet I don't see how the existence of surviving mansions today proves anything about the prevalence of wealthy farmers at the time
Similarly, there's no inherent reason subsistence farming should prove or disprove work outside the farm. The existence of farms large enough to grow and sell surplus food, that doesn't mean all farms could do so
Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.
Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...
Edit: DPRK counts I guess although I'm not sure how many people would call what they have over there "communism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Juche_Idea
There are real customers that want cost reductions that lead to reduced lifetimes, because they have no intention of using the thing they are buying for decades. It isn't just manufacturers looking to make money through planned obsolescence.
Yes surely I'm the one concocting things (rolls eyes)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party
As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.
Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.
Yeah I did that in my last job as a platform engineer, I particularly intented for other teams to be able to work in parallel and also not blocked on me so I have more time to refactor or generally things to make life easier for future-me.
Long story short, I got laid off.